With the advancement and proliferation of computer technology, online shopping, also known as e-commerce, has become one of the major avenues of commerce. Consumers and businesses purchase goods from online vendors more frequently than ever, and the number of transactions and sales revenue are projected to grow year-over-year at a staggering rate.
A recent trend in e-commerce involves hosting companies with a centralized server hosting an e-marketplace where vendors (both third-party and the hosting company itself) can list their products for sale and customers can browse and buy. Some of these hosting companies also have a network of warehouses or distribution centers where the vendors can stock their products so that they can be shipped out quickly from the warehouse once a customer places an order.
Listing a product on the e-marketplace involves submitting information of the product to the hosting company, which includes product images, descriptions, price, etc. The initial responsibility of maintaining the quality and appropriateness of the product information falls on the individual vendors. However, low quality or inappropriate contents may get published on the e-marketplace in the absence of adequate quality control. Moreover, an increasing number of vendors are providing descriptions in an image format, comprising customized marketing materials such as graphical elements, fonts, or graphs. These description images may come in a variety of aspect ratios, margins, and formats, all of which must be reviewed before they can be published on the e-marketplace for consistency among different products or compatibility to the hosting company's system. Other problems with product images include low quality or unnecessarily large images or offensive contents. These problems can lead to lower customer experience, ineffective marketing, or even liability issues not only for the vendor but also for the hosting company.
Currently existing solutions require manual review of individual images. This can be both slow and expensive for the hosting company as the number of different products and vendors increases, especially when each vendor has their own process of preparing the images. Increasing costs of reviewing product information must be absorbed by the hosting company or passed onto individual vendors or customers. Therefore, an automated system and method of managing product images are needed, where inappropriate images can be identified, removed, and/or modified.